IF we make ourselves acquainted with all that Masons know of their freemasonry, we shall find a blank, and that, in fact, they know nothing worthy of being called a secret. I am of opinion, that nothing useful to be known should be made a secret, and that there is nothing of the kind a secret among mankind. I hold, that the mere profession of having such a secret is a vice. The question reasonably arises, why should it be a secret? Of Freemasons, I boldly say, that they have no secret; but there is a secret connected with their association, and they have not known it. The late Godfrey Higgins once observed to me, without explanation, that there were but two Masons in England—himself and the Duke of Sussex. I put in a claim to be a third. He asked me to explain, on the condition that he was not to commit himself by any observation.

I did so, as here set forth. He smiled and withdrew. The secret is now out. I will clear up the doubt and difficulty and teach Masonry to Masons. The following forms of opening, working, and closing lodges are literally and truly the formularies of the three common degrees in Masonic Lodges, or that secret system which is called Craft Masonry. It has been communicated to me by Masons; it has been confirmed by other Masons; it has been the Standard Manual of Masonry, since it was first published in “The Republican,” in 1825; it has made many Masons without the lodge initiation, and, by its direction, I have been assured that men who were never in a lodge have successfully and profitably taught practical masonry. The higher degrees form the subject of other volumes. They are not common; are denominated orders of chivalry ; and but very few Masons go beyond the Royal Arch Degree.

The great subject of Masonry is Solomon’s Temple. The two first secret words are Boaz and Jachin, the pillars of the porch of that temple. Through all the Masonic degrees, ancient or modern, the subject continues to be a dark development of the building of the temple. I am about to throw light upon it. My historical researches have taught me that that which has been called Solomon’s Temple never existed upon earth : that a nation of people called Israelites never existed upon earth : and that the supposed history of Israelites and their temple is nothing more than an allegory relating to the mystery of physics generally, and the moral culture of the human mind.

Hence the real secret of masonry. The word temple is derived from the Latin word tempus, time; and, therefore, the ancient structures called temples were in reality intended to be records of time and archives of human knowledge. Such institutions would have been a great benefit to mankind ; but the veil of superstition was thrown over them ; it was deemed politic or profitable to the few to deceive the many ; that which should have been a simple record of fact was worked up into an allegory : there arose an esoteric doctrine for those initiated in the secrets of the temple, and a deceptious exoteric doctrine for the multitude; and this was the origin of a priesthood ; this the lamentable change from science to priestcraft ; this the secret of Freemasonry, the key of the mysteries of the Christian religion, and the basis of Judaism. Judaism, Christianity, and Freemasonry, are, in principle, one and the same, as to secret origin and mystery.

Let us endeavour to turn the stream ; to go from priestcraft to science, from mystery to knowledge, from allegory to real history. But for planetary motion, there could have been no division of time. The relations of the sun to the planets and fixed stars make up all the natural divisions of time; such as the day, the month, the year, and the corresponding seasons. The day is marked by the motion of the earth on its own axis. The month (lunar) by the appearances of the moon; and (solar or calendar) by the grouping of stars into twelve divisions, which are called the Zodiac, pictorially marked by signs, and seen opposite to the solar side of the earth, in the successive months. The year is complete when the sun appears to return to a given spot from which it is said to start. The polar motions of the earth cause the sun to appear in a state of birth, growth, maturity, decay, and death, in the course of a year, producing our seasons. These appearances have been poetically allegorized and personified; and hence all that has been invented about god or gods, about new born god, living god, dying god, descending god, resurrection god, ascending god.

There is no plain historical truth, no revelation, about god, in existence, other than those of the relations of the sun to the planets and stars, in physics, and the cultivation of the human mind in morals. All other such pretensions to history may be historically disproved. We are prepared with historical disproofs of the existence of such a people as Israelites or Jews as a nation. They were a religious or philosophical sect, who had been made adepts in the higher Pagan Mysteries : a sect among nations ; but not a nation among sects. Our common temples, like those of the ancients, have generally, and only with a few modern exceptions, been built due east and west, in respect to the rising and setting of the sun. The steeples have been conical emblems of flame, which is again emblematical of the sun. Etymology will carry every word connected with religion back to primitive sun-worship, and mental cultivation. The emblems of the most ancient temples of which we have ruins, are emblems of time, of planetary bodies, their motions and relations, and of sun-worship, &c. It is therefore calling for no great stretch of the imagination, for no strange credulity, to call for the admission that the first temples were dedicated to the sun ; that the first principles of religion consisted of a scientific record of the sun’s annual path through the signs of the Zodiac, with other then known science ; and that the first efforts of priestly and cunning men would be to deceive the vulgar upon this subject, to preach the reality of the personified god, which science forbad, and the existence of which the principles of matter or of nature rendered impossible.

When man began to make God like himself, he began also to give God a dwelling-place, such as he found or could make on earth. The first temples that were imagined by ingenuity were temples in the heavens, time marked by planetary partitions. Thus we read of the New Jerusalem, coming down from heaven as a dwelling-place for the saints of the earth. The seven churches of Asia were seven imaginary temples in heaven, reduced to a figurative tale, and then imitated on earth. Thus again that which is called the building of the first Solomon’s Temple never took place on earth ; but the story of the temple was fabricated; and the first Jewish historian we have (Josephus) allows that it was allegorical and emblematical of the universe, or of all the physical phenomena. The true meaning, then, of the building of Solomon’s temple, in Freemasonry is, and the practice of the lodges should be, to the effect that the grand secret of all religion is this allegorical typification of the solar relations and planetary motions with mental and moral cultivation, and that such, in truth, is the great lost secret of Freemasonry. The masons have lost the initiatory secret—have been numbered among the vulgar, and deceived with the exoterical doctrine of personified deity. Mr. Paine had a glimmering light on this subject, but he was ignorant of the details. He made a shrewd guess at the thing, and guessed rightly as to a part of the principle, though he could not fill out the history and origin. The esoterical principle of Freemasonry, and of Christianity and of Judaism, is SUN-WORSHIP AND SCIENCE, AS THE BASIS OF HUMAN CULTURE AND DISCIPLINE, the common Paganism of the Hunan race. Mr. Paine guessed at this in relation to Freemasonry, but knew it not in relation to Christianity and Judaism.

I purpose to furnish here nothing more than the Key-stone to the Arch of Freemasonry, which is the moral and gist of the Royal Arch Degree, at which Masons have played, not worked, without knowing what they were about. For a further proof that I present the right key, I refer the reader to the theologico-astronomical, or Sunday evening discourses, at the Rotunda, of the Rev. Robert Taylor. They are so many philosophical lectures on masonry, though the exposure professedly relates to Christianity. They form two volumes of a cheap publication, entitled “The Devil’s Pulpit.” I refer him also to the works of Dupuis, Volney, Sir. William Drummond, and Rhegellini.

Masons claim Pythagoras as one of their fraternity. They may also claim every Grecian and Roman sage, who sought out the Pagan mysteries. But the Modern Masons are not very worthy disciples of those ancient men. The proper business of a Mason is astronomical, chemical, geological, and moral science, and more particularly that of the ancients, with all the mysteries and fables founded upon it. A good Mason would, in fact have no superstition. It should be his boast, that his science takes him out of modern religion. He who can build Solomon’s Temple, in the allegorical sense, is disqualified from being a fanatic. Deism has been charged upon, and even boasted of, by modern Masons ; but as a sect, they are innocent of any science that can take them out of the common impressions of modern religious doctrines. Astrology, gipsy fortune telling, Modern Freemasonry, Mahometanism, Christianity, and Judaism, now so called, have sprung from, and are so many corruptions of, the ancient mysteries of the Pagans. Star-gazing, without proper human culture, has been the source of all religion. Lunacy is a disorder improperly ascribed to Luna, or the Moon ; for moonstruck madness had never befallen any one who had not been corrupted in education, and had the brain badly cultivated.

The first professions of Christianity, as visible in the New Testament, were professed revelations of the ancient Pagan mysteries ; but, as a revelation, it was a failure—and it would have been better if the ancient Paganism had not been superseded by the grosser mysteries that have, in ignorance, been adopted, of the God’s-spell or gospel. However, let them all now repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, and the key will be freely given to anyone who will unlock and enter.

That there was no such a nation as the Israelites, is a truth —found in the consideration that they are not mentioned beyond the Bible in any records whatever. Egypt knew them not, Persia knew them not, Hindoostan knew them not, Scythia knew them not, Phoenicia knew them not, Greece knew them not, as a nation. And in the first general notice that we have of the Jews, they are introduced to the world as a sect, or a series of sects, being Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes ; and in that general notice, beyond that sort of mistaken allegorical history which Josephus has copied from the books of the Old Testament, and which is not otherwise corroborated, and no better authority than the book of the Old Testament, there is no presentation of the Jews as the descendants of a larger nation of Israelites ; as a religious or philosophical sect of distinction, mixed up with, and found in real human history, they are not to be traced higher than the century before the Christian era. It is satisfactory to be able to show the origin of anything, for such a knowledge is a common passion and curiosity among mankind ; and I think the Rev. Robert Taylor has discovered and developed the origin of the titles of Hebrew, Israelite, and Jew.

The Eleusinian mysteries were Pagan; the same in relation to Isis in Egypt, as to Ceres in Greece, and continued in relation to the Virgin Mary, as a part of the mistaken Christian mystery. It is the fault of Freemasonry, that it has had nothing feminine belonging to it ; the ladies make no part of its mysteries, and to the ladies it has been a matter of great uneasiness. They very naturally, and very properly, suspect the propriety of all exclusively male association. The Jews have nothing feminine in their religion. No religion has provided a paradise, or future happy state, for earthly women. They should be all infidels of course. The modern construction and mistaken reading, under what is called the Christian Religion, has become a great burlesque on them. The word Eleusis is the Greek of Adventus, the Latin, the Advent, of the Christian mystery; and signifies THE COMING (emphatically), and literally, the coming of light. The story of the transfiguration on the mount, in the New Testament, is an imperfect description of the holding of a Lodge of association in the highest degree of the Eleusinian mystery.

The Lodge was held by Peter, James, and John, or the personified months of January, April, or June, July, and August. The degrees of Freemasonry are allegorical of the same mystery. The very miracles of the New Testament are allegorical sketches of the different degrees of the same mysteries. The turning of water into wine is the process of vinous vegetation, and one of the mysteries of Bacchus, who was also that light which was to come, the Messiah; the Sun, in physics, or the physical saviour ; the Logos, Christ, or principle of Reason ; as the moral saviour. The marriage of Cana, in Galilee, was the marriage supper of the Lamb ; the spring of the year ; the midway between the watering-pot of Aquarius, or watery season, and the ripening of the grape. “Woman,” said Jesus to his mother, “what have I to do with thee? My time is not yet come.” Summer and autumn are the time of Bacchus. But he turned the water into wine, and so he does every year.

The feeding of the multitude with 8 few small loaves and fishes is a mystery significant of the prolific power in the earth in the growth of corn, and of the water in the production of fishes. The curing of diseases, of lameness and blindness, casting out devils, allaying a storm, walking on the water, the resurrection of the dead, and the ascension into heaven, are all so many solar mysteries or allegorical relations of the sun’s action upon the earth, figured with an association of scientific and moral powers in man. The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is the joint mystery of the union of Ceres and Bacchus— the Pagan producers of corn, or bread and wine, which are truly, in an allegorical, physical sense, the real body and blood of Christ. We shall find that Freemasonry has been a corrupted continuation of all those mysteries ; and that the Masons have really, as they confess they have, lost their own secret. Let us see what learning can do to restore it to them. Much of the ritual of our church, even of our English church, is but a misunderstood continuation and corruption of the words and ceremonies of the ancient Pagan mysteries. [excerpt]

What is the York Rite of Freemasonry?
The Blue Lodges, together with the Royal Arch Chapters, the Councils of Royal and Select Masters, and the Commanderies of the Knights Templar constitute the YORK RITE OF FREEMASONRY. “Further Light” and the long lost Master’s word may be found by completing all Degrees and Orders of the York Rite.
There are various Masonic related organizations for the whole family, such as the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Shriners, Social Order of the Beauceants, Eastern Star, Daughters of the Nile, the Orders of Knights of Saint Andrew, DeMolay Boys, Rainbow Girls and a multitude of other Masonic Organizations, which expand on these teachings of brotherly love, relief and truth.
Together, they touch many lives through community service or financial contributions to approved organizations such as the Masonic Charities of Hawaii, the K.T. Foundation of Hawaii, the Shriners Hospital for Children Honolulu, the Royal Arch Research Assistance, the Cryptic Mason Medical Research Foundation, the Knights Templar Eye Foundation and others.
The York Rite Legend, its esoteric secrets and Constitution have been the predominant factor in Freemasonry from the year 926 A.D. down through the years when the first Speculative Grand Lodge was formed in England in 1717 with its Charter largely based on the York Rite Charter, when it expanded across the continent of Europe and to the
four corners of the earth. Therefore, every Grand Lodge of today is a lineal descendant of the 926 A.D. York Rite Assembly of Masons. Its members include men from all walks of life, including monarchs, presidents, military, business and community leaders. The Grand York Rite Bodies of Hawaii consist of the Grand Chapter of Royal Arch
Masons, the Grand Council of Cryptic Masons, the Grand Commandery of Knights Templar and its subordinate York Rite Bodies.

The controversial issue of serving police officers being members of the Freemasons has been a recurring theme in policing in England and Wales for some 50 years. There has been consistent disquiet about the potential for the organisation to exert informal political influence on the police, impinging on operational matters.

However, these days, the organisation has marginal, if any, influence on operational policing. This is in part thanks to constitutional changes within the service. Another factor is the increasingly diverse nature of the workforce, which employs far more women than hitherto.

Son come and sees, the Freemasons are here. Who are they? They are those who walk from the East to the West and from North to South with the firmly sustained in the universe. Why does the land shake at every step that give? Because each one of them transport over his shoulders the weigh of a temple raised over the truth.